Taking RDF and Topic Maps seriously

- what happens when you drink the Kool Aid

Kent Fitch, AustLit Project AustLit Project, Academy Library, UNSW@ADFA, Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra, ACT, 2600. Email: k.fitch@adfa.edu.au

Keywords

RDF, Topic Maps, semantic web, application design

Abstract

A great deal of attention has been focussed on the concept of the "Semantic Web". One of the core ideas behind the Semantic Web is the creation of machine-processable relationships between resource identifiers (URI's). Two often discussed ways of representing those relationships are RDF and Topic Maps.

This paper describes how the concepts and goals of RDF and Topic Maps influenced the design of the Australian Literature Gateway (AustLit) project.